Popo

Can’t wait to try the 8-bit pixel filter.

I grabbed it and started playing today - it plays a really mean game of Doom, the sprites, guns and lighting effects are all ‘enhanced’ compared with the classic skin and they look the business - especially the chain gun. Recommended. Edit - the music is way creepier too, the whole thing has a horror vibe.

I saw that this was available to rent from Amazon for £1.99 and watched it last night - absolutely brilliant. It married the weird, creeping sense of foreboding and awesome style and photography of the Witch with a far more engaging script and brilliantly barmy characters. Horrifying one minute, hilarious the next. Willem Dafoe in particular knocked it out the park - his wild, charged eyes deserve an Oscar nomination on their own - but R-Pats was also great, there was virtually nothing left of the scenery after those two got through with it.

Play until you get to the City of Tears and tell me if you still think it's ugly.

And if I could add - I used the shadow dash alongside the slash bounce to evade his attacks which saw me through. Probably the hardest boss in the game though, alongside Broken Vessel (note - I never did Godholme!). It bears repeating - the bosses in Hollow Knight require patience and for you to learn their attack patterns in order to devise a strategy that lets you avoid their attacks and hit them when they’re not attacking. Don’t get greedy and do use opportunities to heal instead of attack wen you need to.

Agreed, I don’t think it would necessarily be confusing, that’s not what I’m suggesting. Having said that I don’t think that means one can directly apply the lessons from, say, the mobile phone industry to the console industry. Different technology, different consumer, different motivating factors.

You’re not comparing like for like - the existing flavours of PS4/Xbox One were slim and upgraded versions and launched mid-way through the generation, years after the original consoles. Launching a cut down version of a console alongside that console is a completely different proposition. My belief is that launching two consoles, both of which are an upgrade to the last generation and both of which can play the same games, is a really tricky prospect for consumers and most likely will result in Series X under performing in the market as it’s main defining feature will be that it the me expensive one. But I’ve probably banged my drum loud and long enough at this point and will refrain from doing so further.

I’m not sure if this is a recent thing (they certainly weren’t there before) but loads of Square soundtracks are now on Spotify, including my all-time favourite Chrono Cross. I’m listening to Final Fantasy X, which thanks to Spotify I can now understand why it was so uneven - all the Nobuo Uematsu tracks are great while all the Junya Nakano tracks are, to be fair, pretty dull and lifeless. And let’s just pretend Otherworld never happened.

That all makes sense, I should say that it is for those reasons mentioned that I don’t think MS will release a Series S any time soon, for fear of sucking all the oxygen out of the Series X launch. I think I’m right in saying the One S is just the mid-generation slim model of the One, effectively replacing it in the market, while the One X is more powerful; equivalent to PS4 Slim/Pro? Putting out a cut-down model of a console alongside the flagship is uncharted territory, no?

Not knowing about how games are developed, I don't know. It seems to me from my armchair position that, for developers, consoles are a useful way of targeting their software at a particular spec and knowing that they're spending resources in a hopefully cost-effective way. If the return on investment was significantly higher to develop for Series S (because the installed base was chunkier) I imagine the maths would be hard to ignore. It's not like PC where you have to accommodate for every possible combination of hardware because the hardware market is a wild west and it's pure necessity - Microsoft are proposing two different hardware streams, each with potentially distinct consumer bases - customers who was bleeding edge visuals and performance and those who don't.

Also - how will that influence developers' decisions on supporting 4K or ray tracing (or whatever the next bleeding edge technology may be) on the Xbox platform?

Is the Series S just a rumour at this moment or has it been confirmed as on the roadmap? My fear with launching both systems side by side is that the cheaper version will undercut the full price model. I think it’s more likely Microsoft will launch any potential cut-rate model later in the cycle.

Take it to the best Simpsons joke ever thread!

You called?

What on Earth are you people doing to your controllers? I haven’t broken a pad in 30 years of gaming.